In the US we are taking an extremely myopic hedge that vaccines alone are all we need - nothing else matters.
But w insufficient vaccination rates in much of the US and with Variants that may ultimately break through waning protection, we may well regret being naive on this
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Focusing most resources solely on vaccines at expense of essentially all other useful public health efforts for over a year has cost far too many lives.
We should be planning for the worst and hoping for the best - not simply planning for the best and calling it a day.
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First - we do not yet have all the information about what exactly an Antibody titer specifically means post vaccine in terms of protection.
So making a binary assessment of protection, or lack of protection based on antibody titers at this moment isn’t necessarily wise
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But just bc we don’t currently have all the correlates of protection worked out now, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t gather Ab information today for our future selves.
We are in the middle of a pandemic. Science is moving FAST! In 6 months we may wish we had our early Ab titers
3/
Decision to recommend against antibody test after vaccination is yet another poor decision.
If CDC/FDA willing to say that full vaccination = immunity, then there is no good reason to say antibody positivity after vaccination does not equal immunity
So on the positive side, if just getting a vaccine implies immunity per, then a positive response after a vaccine that is detectable by antibodies should imply that the person was vaccinated - thus protected.
But...
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But..on negative side - if someone fails to seroconvert to positive on EUA authorized Ab tests after vaccination... this would be crucial knowledge for someone to have and to talk to their doctor about.
FDA should be encouraging Ab testing post vaccine - esp serial measures
3/
As high income nations squabble over whether to vaccinate the youngest and least vulnerable, much of the world has yet to vaccinate their absolute most vulnerable.
Global inequities run deep. But this is a particularly egregious one.
Again, these are optimization problems.
We should ask questions like: how many childhood doses are worth a single dose in a 70 year old in India.
Probably you need thousands of childhood doses to offer as much benefit as a single dose to a 70 year old.
Of course, these are not just simple public health decisions that need to be optimized - these are massive geopolitical (mis?)calculations that are above my pay grade.
Just to be clear: 10% of the *detected* cases. Of course there were many more cases that no test picked up.
“If they had waited until they developed symptoms to get a PCR test, and then waited another 24 hours until they got the PCR results, that’s at least two days where they might have been unknowingly spreading the virus.”
The paper shows 500 ppl who went to a concert and were rapid tested before hand.
They also received super high sensitivity molecular lab tests before as well - but the results arrived only after the event.
2/x
What they found was interesting.
First - no one turned up positive on the rapid test at the outset. So a strong evaluation of its ability to screen ppl out didn’t really happen. But that’s ok, we already know the test sensitivity.